Prudence Crowther, a senior editor at the New York Review of Books, saw my blog post on the hitherto unknown caricatures of Kierkegaard in which I mention that there had apparently been an auction of Kierkegaard’s personal effects after his death. Crowther wanted to know the source for that information, as well as for my assertion that Kierkegaard “had become a kind of cult figure at the time of his death.” The NYRB is publishing a review of the British theologian Daphne Hampson’s book on Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique (Oxford, 2013) and they were thinking of using the caricature that accompanied that blog post to illustrate the review.

It is fairly well known among Kierkegaard scholars that Kierkegaard had become something of a cult figure by the time of his death. Hansine Andræ, the wife of C.G. Andræ, a mathematician and liberal Danish politician observed in her diary that Kierkegaard had a “large readership” and that his attack on the church at the end of his life “aroused a great sensation” (Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark [Indiana, 1990] p. 483). Many, though not all, prominent Danish intellectuals reacted badly to Kierkegaard’s attack on the church, but there was a great deal of sympathy with it on the part of common people.

Copenhagen is, and was even more so in Kierkegaard’s day, a small town with an even smaller community of intellectuals. Nearly everyone who did not actually know Kierkegaard personally, knew of him, if for no other reason, because he was so often caricatured in popular periodicals such as Corsaren and Folkets Nisse. As I mentioned in the blog post that had drawn Ms. Crowther’s attention, “[o]ne of the most important discoveries Peter Tudvad made when working on his book, Kierkegaards København (Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen) (Politiken, 2004), was that the attacks on Kierkegaard in the satirical newspaper The Corsair, were not confined to 1846, as scholars had assumed, but actually spanned the period from 1846 until Kierkegaard’s death in 1855.” The caricature above was published in The Corsair in 1848. It depicts Kierkegaard beating up on the newspaper Berlingske Tidende for its having the audacity to praise him when this, according to Tudvad’s caption to the drawing as it appears in his book, was a privilege Kierkegaard granted only to Bishop Mynster.

Kierkegaard also enjoyed a certain popularity with the common people because of his edifying writings, his pietist leanings, and his skewering in his writings of important Danish cultural figures. So Kierkegaard was known either personally, or by reputation by nearly everyone. This was likely the reason for the crowd at his burial, as well as for what Flemming Chr. Nielsen refers to as the “scandal” (Nielsen, p. 7) and what I have heard other scholars refer to as the “riot” caused by Kierkegaard’s nephew, the physician Henrik Lund, when he made a speech during Kierkegaard’s burial protesting that Kierkegaard had not wanted a church burial. It wasn’t actually a riot, according to Tudvad’s description at the end of his Kierkegaards København (Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen) (Politiken, 2004 [pp. 483-484). Rioting is a little extreme for Danes. The muted applause with which Lund’s speech was met by some in the crowd is about as close to rioting as the Danes get.

So it seems relatively safe to say that Kierkegaard had become something of a cult figure in Denmark by the time of his death. I realized, however, after I received Ms. Crowther’s email, that I had no source for my observation that there was apparently an auction of Kierkegaard’s personal effects, no source, that is, other than the caption of the drawing. It says, literally, “Scene at the Auction of Søren Kierkegaard.” Well, okay, “efter” doesn’t usually mean “of.” It usually means “after.” Still, the meaning of the caption is pretty unambiguous. Realizing, however, that I had no other evidence to substantiate the claim that there had been an auction of Kierkegaard’s personal effects, I wrote to Peter Tudvad, to see if he could enlighten me on this point. Scholars have long known that Kierkegaard’s books were auctioned off after his death, though they know as well that Kierkegaard began divesting himself of certain of his books before he died, so the facsimile of the auction catalog that one can purchase from the Royal Library in Copenhagen is not the final word on whether Kierkegaard ever owned a particular book. Until I saw the caricature of two women fighting over one of his shirts, however, I had not heard anything about his personal effects being auctioned as well.

They were. Tudvad sent me a link to the book Alt Blev Godt Betalt: Auktionen over Søren Kierkegaard’s indbo (Everything was Paid For: The Auction of Kierkegaard’s Personal Effects) by Flemming Chr. Nielsen (Holkenfeldt, 2000) an annotated version of the auction catalog of Kierkegaard’s personal effects from which I quoted above. My curiosity was piqued, however, so I didn’t want to wait for the book to arrive from Denmark. As luck would have it, the library over at the University of Pennsylvania had a copy.

Kierkegaard apparently had little of real value, just the sort of comfortable furnishing anyone in a similar situation would have (although he had lots of curtains, apparently because, he worried about the effect of bright light on his eyes [Pap.X3 A 144]). He had a few other peculiarities such what his personal secretary, Israel Levin, described as an “unbelievable number of walking sticks” (Nielsen, p. 30) and 30 bottles of wine (quite a cellar for a small apartment such as the one in which he was living when he died).

There was nothing really out of the ordinary among Kierkegaard’s personal effects, yet the sale netted more than twice the amount it had been estimated it would, and that lends further support to the view that Kierkegaard had become something of a cult figure in Denmark by the time of his death.

Nielsen made an interesting discovery when doing the research for his book on the auction. It concerns a framed print that it appears Kierkegaard’s older brother, Niels Andreas, must have sent to him from the U.S. where he’d emigrated in 1832. Nielsen actually wrote a whole book on Niels Andreas Kierkegaard, Ind i verdens vrimmel: Søren Kierkegaards ukendte bror (In the tumult of the world: Søren Kierkegaard’s unknown brother). I’ve never read that book, but now I am curious about it, so I ordered a copy from abebooks.com. I’ll do a post about the book, and about the print Niels Andreas apparently sent to Kierkegaard, after I have had a chance to read it. If you are interested in reading it yourself, abebooks still has one more copy available.

That book has to make its way over here from Denmark, however, so it will be a while before I can post about it. Hampson’s book, on the other hand, is available as an ebook, so I’ve already started reading it and will be posting about it soon.

One of the most important discoveries Peter Tudvad made when working on his book, Kierkegaards København (Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen), was that the attacks on Kierkegaard in the satirical newspaper The Corsair, were not confined to 1846, as scholars had assumed, but actually spanned the period from 1846 until Kierkegaard’s death in 1855. This makes Kierkegaard’s continued preoccupation with the Corsair, and its merciless caricaturing of him, appear less neurotic than has been assumed. He continued to be preoccupied with the newspaper because it continued to be preoccupied with him. Kierkegaard was hence not exaggerating when he described himself as an object of public ridicule.

The situation was even worse though than scholars have assumed. The Corsair was not the only paper to ridicule Kierkegaard. Another paper, Folkets Nisse (the people’s elf) also published caricatures of or relating to Kierkegaard over an extended period. The drawing above is one such caricature. Apparently, Kierkegaard’s effects were auctioned off after his death. The drawing depicts two women fighting over one of Kierkegaard’s shirts. It’s interesting not simply as an example of a hitherto unknown collection of contemporary caricatures but also because it tells us something about how Kierkegaard was viewed around the period of his death. Scholars have often portrayed him as a marginal figure in Danish history, one whose brilliance was really first discovered beyond the borders of his own country. The drawing makes clear, however, that he had become a kind of cult figure by the time of his death and that there was thus probably far more sympathy with his attack on the Danish Lutheran Church than is ordinarily assumed.

There are many more drawings like the one above in Folkets Nisse. I cannot claim credit for having discovered them. They were discovered by Paul A. Bauer in the late 1990s when he purchased a bound volume of Folkets Nisse from an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen. I am indebted to Anne Marie Furbo of the The Royal Library in Copenhagen for tracking down this particular drawing which I had remembered only vaguely but which I wanted to use for the cover of my forthcoming book, Fear and Dissembling: The Copenhagen Kierkegaard Controversy.

If you plan to go to Copenhagen, stop by The Royal Library. I’m sure the folks there will be similarly helpful to you if you want to track down more of these hitherto unknown caricatures.

Welcome to “Piety on Kierkegaard.” I’m the Kierkegaard scholar M.G. Piety. I’m an associate professor of philosophy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. I’m the translator of Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford, 2009) and the author of Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralistic Epistemology (Baylor, 2010). I moved to Denmark in the fall ... Continue reading →